Week 4

SATURDAY

Today was a pretty mellow day. I slept on my neck wrong, and to turn my head I have to pivot at the waist, so I'm not much help in the heavy lifting department. We got caught up on stuff around the house, and did some shopping for the stuff that goes in the bathroom. This is the fun part! We've finally settled on a design direction, and I'm using this picture as inspiration:



Of course, our bathroom will be lacking the luxurious spa with flower petals floating in it, as well as the $1500 vanities that I love.

Who knew that vanities would cost so much?!? With Pottery Barn out of the question, we went to Home Depot expo, and found a few that we liked. Here was the frontrunner:




Of course, this costs $750. And we're having his and her sinks, so multiply that by 2. Ouch. In order to mack out the shower, we're having to make compromises in other areas, and this is one of them. We weren't loving any of the vanities in stock at Home Depot or Lowes, so we started flipping through the Ikea catalog. We love this big sink, and it only costs $90!



And we found one vanity that goes with the sink that could work:




I don't love it, but I could live with it for the $1000+ that it's going to save us. However, it's the wrong color. We want dark wood. It's made of real wood, but it's lacquered. So we bought a $10 wall rack of the same lacquered pine, and we're going to sand and stain it to see if we can do the same to the vanities w/o making them look like ass. I'm crossing my fingers, because we're pretty much out of affordable options. A friend of mine recommended JC Penney and we found 2 vanities on their website that weren't bad and were within our price range, but they only carry them in their catalog. I refuse to order something that I haven't seen in person.

Next, we went to Atlanta Salvage. They had some unfinished sink cabinets, but none of them were the right size for the Ikea sink. We did find a window we liked to go in the wall above the shower. It's unfinished and only $25.



After a little lunch at Taqueria, we headed up to Floor and Decor to finalize our shower and floor tile selection. We knew we wanted Tumblestone for the interior of the shower, and decided on these:

Wall:



Floor:



Tumblestone is pretty expensive, at least by our standards. The tiles we want for the shower are $8 & $10/square foot, and the sealer is $99/gallon. We had planned to do the floor in a larger tumblestone tile, but even at $4/sq foot, this exceeded what we were hoping to spend on our tile budget, especially with the amount of sealer we would need.



We found some travertine that looked almost exactly like the tumblestone, only it was $2/square foot cheaper. However, we decided to make one last round of the store to make sure we had exhausted all of our options. Ultimately, we decided on the very last tile sample we looked at, which took us in a bit of a different direction:



It's a porcelain tile designed to look like tumblestone, but is considerably cheaper and doesn't require sealing. I actually like it even better because it has some dark brown in it which will bring in the dark brown wood we're planning to use - plus I wasn't 100% loving a largely beige bathroom. It coordinates well with the tumblestone, and if we find out we can't stain the Ikea vanities, the color they are may work. But I'm hoping we'll be able to stain them. Or find other ones - we're still looking.

Next we went to Lowes to look for new french doors to replace the current ones - I want ones like the Pottery Barn pic. We want wood so we can stain it, and the doors that came with the house are metal. Lowes didn't have any stock doors, and the custom ones started around $1500, so we're gonna have to keep looking.

This was pretty much an all-day deal, so by the time we got home it was dinner time. Which means quittin' time.


SUNDAY

Joseph came over today to do some odds and ends. He and Chuck lowered the closet beam to make room for our cubbies, and they drywalled the back of the closet. We still need to mud, sand, paint, and frame the cubbies, which Chuck and I can do ourselves. My neck was still bothering me, so I did a bunch of house catch-up stuff.

Joseph isn't available again until after the 23rd, so he also roughed in the plumbing so we can level the floor. My dad is coming to visit and help with that in 2 weeks.

Chuck found a guy on Craigslist, whose name was NaNa, who showed up with a 20' Uhaul to take away the trash pile for less than a dumpster rental. Bless his heart, it was a crap job, and I would have gladly paid more to have avoided doing it ourselves. We shall name our firstborn NaNa.

We knocked off at 4 today, because we hit a good stopping point, and because our house is filthy and our dogs hate us.